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3 results

  • two - Pandemics, Metaphors and What It Means to Be Human

  • Edited by Paul Martin, University of Sheffield, Stevienna de Saille, University of Sheffield, Kirsty Liddiard, University of Sheffield, Warren Pearce, University of Sheffield
  • Book:
    Being Human during COVID-19
    Published by:
    Bristol University Press
    Published online:
    13 October 2022
    Print publication:
    26 April 2022, pp 20-27

  • Summary

    Knowledge and human knowledge

    Knowledge and metaphor go hand in hand. We create and expand knowledge through metaphors and we need knowledge to understand metaphors. Metaphors are crucial to the production of knowledge, as they allow humans to make connections between what is already known and thinkable and what is not yet known and neither thinkable nor sayable. By mapping meaning from one domain of knowledge or perception onto another, metaphors create new meaning. This includes knowledge of what it means to be human.

    The ability of metaphor to make us see things in certain ways, and from there to understand and explain them, is fundamental to seeing, understanding and dealing with unknown and invisible phenomena. At the end of 2019 a new virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in China, with the World Health Organization declaring the associated disease, COVID-19, a pandemic on 11 March 2020. As early as 21 January, the US Centers for Disease Control asked a science illustrator to provide an image of the virus. This image of a spikey ball, and many others like it, spread around the world and became one of the first ways in which people came to know the virus and the pandemic.

    The spikey ball inspired numerous subsequent images, as well as many polemical takes on how politicians had failed to deal with the virus. This chapter outlines how two heavily criticized leaders, former US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, used metaphors to shape a verbal image of the virus that served their political purposes.

    All knowledge is political but some is more political than the rest. Metaphors play an important role in bringing knowledge and politics together, but can enhance ignorance as well as understanding.

    Metaphors that make us less human

    In April 2020, former President Trump started to repeatedly use a familiar and worrying metaphor, describing the virus as the ‘invisible enemy’ (Chan, 2020): ‘In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our Great American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States’.

  • Low carbon diet: Reducing the complexities of climate change to human scale

  • Brigitte Nerlich, Vyvyan Evans, Nelya Koteyko
  • Journal:
    Language and Cognition / Volume 3 / Issue 1 / March 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 March 2014, pp. 45-82

  • For many years, cognitive linguists, such as Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, have studied meaning construction through language based on intricate mental mapping operations. Their research suggests that conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending permit human beings to reduce very complex issues to human scale. Climate change is such a complex issue. We ask: How is it linguistically reduced to human scale and, in the process, made amenable to thinking and acting? To address these questions, we have analysed the emergence of lexical compounds around a recent key word in debates about climate change in the English speaking world, namely ‘carbon’. One such compound and metaphor/blend is ‘low carbon diet’. In this article we study how the use of the compound ‘low carbon diet’ in an advertising campaign, a book, and by a catering company in the United States permitted US newspapers to reduce climate change to human scale. We have combined and compared metaphor and blending analysis with media and discourse analysis to shed light on the linguistic framing of a real-world problem, that is, we engaged in applied blending analysis.